Ouyang Jianghe has produced a masterpiece equaling Xu Bing’s magnificent “Phoenix”
in scale and political acuity. I can think of no parallel for this poem in the writing
of my country, where ekphrastic poetry is a rather pale medium. What verve and penetrating wit!
He mixes phenomenology, mystical appetite and jeremiad to produce an unforgettable critique
of the entrepreneurial titanism of the new China.
—Tim Lilburn

Ouyang Jianghe belongs to the generation of Chinese poets known as the “post-Misty” school,
the second wave of poets to emerge in the 1980s in the warming political climate
after the end of the Cultural Revolution. The first wave, whose representative poets included
Duo Duo, Gu Cheng, and most prominently, Bei Dao, transmuted the surrealism of French
and Latin American poetry into a vehicle for political allegory. “Phoenix,”
a mini-epic ekphrastic poem written as a companion piece to Xu Bing’s sculpture of the same name,
multiplies the complexity of his earlier poems by an order of magnitude. It is,
by his own account, his magnum opus. Synthesizing his earlier concerns of the materiality
of language, the Chinese literary legacy, and the role of art in society into a sustained
meditation on the theme of flight, it reflects two and a half decades of work refining
the “difficult” language of Misty poetry into a vessel for sophisticated philosophical inquiry.

Known as one of the “Five Masters from Sichuan,” Ouyang Jianghe is one
of China’s most influential avant-garde poets. His intricate, fugue-like poems
are concerned with dissecting the layers of meaning that underlie everyday objects
and notions such as “doubled shadows.”
He is also a prominent art critic and calligrapher; he lives in Beijing.

A Chinese-English literary translator, Austin Woerner has translated
a collection of poetry by Ouyang Jianghe
(Doubled Shadows)
a novel by Su Wei, and edited the English edition of the Chinese literary magazine
Chutzpah!. A graduate of Yale and of the New School's creative writing
MFA program, he joined Ouyang in 2009 as the first author-translator pair
to participate in the Literature in Translation Program at the Vermont Studio Center.

Rural Taiwan and its landscape are present in many of Xiang Yang’s poems.
Landscape and rural poems have a long history in China, generally depicting the court or city
as decadent places exercising a corrupting influence. In many contemporary poems from Taiwan,
the sense of alienation one associates with modern life is viewed as a largely urban phenomenon,
whereas all healthy values reside in the countryside. But this dichotomy, which is also seen
as a shortcoming of such contemporary poetry, is itself a significant part of the local
literary tradition of Nativism, which emerged during the Japanese occupation (1895–1945)
as writers and artists sought to articulate a sense of Taiwan identity.

The so-called “third generation poets,” such as Xiang Yang, Du Ye, and Lo Qing, wanted to see
a resurgence of Chinese national and local culture after years of foreign domination.
In Taiwan, this revival was complex and multifaceted: the trend toward Westernization
in the cultural sphere was subverted by a resurgence of interest in traditional Chinese culture,
and political domination by the Kuomintang from the Mainland was opposed by promotion
of Taiwanese language and culture. Xiang Yang himself eventually decided to explore two avenues:
to write poetry in his native southern Min dialect and to experiment with formalist verse.
“I asked myself what made classical poems so enduring,” he says. “It seemed to me
that the strict compositional rules and forms of classical poetry contributed greatly
to poetic quality.” He began experimenting with forms and rhyme, finally settling
on a ten-line poem broken into two quintets as the form most suited to his temperament.
It can be said that form made a poet out of him: formal limitations helped to channel
and structure the poetic impulse.
—from the translator’s introduction

Xiang Yang’s poetry stands as elegant testimony to the Taiwan experience.
The author of seven volumes of poetry in his younger years, he has, since the publication of
The Four Seasons (1986), published but a single collection titled Chaos, in 2005.
In the intervening years, he earned a PhD in journalism and moved into academia.
He is also an established woodblock artist.

John Balcom is a translator of Chinese literature. Recent publications include
Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry (contributor),
Wintry Night by Li Qiao (co-translator), The City Trilogy by Chang His-kuo and
Taiwan’s Indigenous Writers: An Anthology of Stories, Essays, and Poems,
which received the 2006 Northern California Book Award. He translated
Driftwood
and Stone Cell,
both by Lo Fu, which were published by Zephyr Press.

From one of China’s most important poets after 1980, this is a stunning book of poetry,
a poetry that is characterized by electric honesty and acute observation. In these pages,
we hear Wang Xiaoni’s candid and penetrating voice about contemporary China—all through
her quiet but powerful verse. The translator Eleanor Goodman, herself a wonderful poet,
should be congratulated for her brilliant translation.
—Kang-i Sun Chang, Malcolm G. Chace ’56 Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures,
Yale University

Wang Xiaoni is a revered Chinese poet who has been writing since her teens. Over the decades,
her poetry has grown more resonant, marked with striking images and extraordinary associations,
and characterized by a quiet personal voice. The poems in this volume embody
a distinct sensibility and a major achievement. Eleanor Goodman’s exacting translation
makes them a pure pleasure to read and reread.
—Ha Jin

Wang Xiaoni has published five books of poetry and been honored with numerous awards,
including the Ann Gao Poetry Prize in 1999, and the Chinese Literature Media Award in 2004.
Her work is known for its keen detail and explication of everyday life.
Something Crosses My Mind, published in China in 2008, spans twenty years of her writing.

Perhaps it is poets most of the world who require the most protection from it.
Wang Xiaoni is nothing if not grounded in China—its people, its fauna and flora, its politics.
Yet to have that world look in on her is a nightmare. Even more, it is a betrayal of the compact
the poet has made with the world: to live in it as a stranger, but to give it full life on the page.
This agreement at times infuses Wang’s work with an almost mystical sense of estrangement.

That is not to say that Wang Xiaoni is a poet with her head in the stars.
Rather, she is grounded in the earth: she writes of potatoes and peanuts, scarecrows and corn.
The animals in her poems are water buffalo, pigs and sheep. What interests her most is people
and how they relate to their natural and unnatural environment. The unnatural environment
is the one created by man: politics, economics, social hierarchies, inequalities.
These issues are addressed, but subtly. They appear in her poems about the countryside
and the implied social inequities therein, in her observations of severe environmental degradation,
in her metaphors of wounds and bones, in her abandoned fields and defiled mountains.
—from the translator’s introduction

A key figure of the post-70s Chinese poets, Wang Xiaoni was born in Changchun,
Jilin in 1955, and spent seven years as a laborer in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.
In 1977, she was accepted into the Chinese Department at Jilin University, and in 1985
she moved to Shenzhen. She has worked as a film script editor and college professor.
Her publications include more than twenty-five books of poetry, essays, and novels.

Eleanor Goodman is a writer and a translator from Chinese.
She is a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University,
and spent a year at Peking University on a Fulbright Fellowship.
Something Crosses My Mind was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Fund.

What is it about rhyme? Whatever it is, we fall in love with it (if ever) early in life:
as soon as we learn to talk, or probably sooner. The same can be said about love for sports.
By bringing together these two forms of attachment, the clever Littlefield reminds us
that poetry and sports, at a level deeper than their different kinds of grandiosity,
both have roots in childhood pleasures.
—Robert Pinsky, Former U.S. Poet Laureate

Poetry in sport?
If there’s a Little field
Where’s the big court?
So next time out
Rhyme out
And take in
Take Me Out.
—Frank Deford, Sports Illustrated, NPR & Real Sports

Bill keeps pace with a variety of sports through the rhythm of his verse and prose.
Always entertaining.
—Joan Benoit Samuelson, Olympic Gold Medalist

Bill Littlefield, first and foremost a writer, plays games even as he writes about them.
He unabashedly versifies not for profit, cosmic meaning, or a championship cup, but for fun.
He makes no bones about it: these verses are doggerel, defined in the OED as
“comic or burlesque verse, usually of irregular rhythm … mean, trivial,
or undignified verse.” And while there is nothing mean or trivial in the lines
that follow here, much is exuberantly undignified. The rhythms, too, are sharper
than they might look at first glance—Read them aloud. Doggerel rhythms and rhymes
have an honorable place in grown-up English letters, at least since Chaucer’s day,
both unself-consciously, as in the touching and ludicrous verse of William McGonagall;
or self-consciously, as in the urbane lyrics of Ogden Nash. And radio,
which has long been Littlefield’s primary medium, proves an encouraging breeding-ground
for light verse of various kinds.
—from the Publisher’s Introduction

The tenderness of Lan Lan’s poetry is steely and perfectly judged. She shows us a world
of subtle adjustments and intelligent beauty—although the stakes she deals in could not be
higher. As its title suggests, Canyon in the Body uncovers both existential and
domestic meanings, writ both large and small in the human environment.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s limpid, unforced translations do the poet, and her Anglophone readers,
a great service.
—Fiona Sampson, Editor of Poem and Professor of Poetry, Roehampton University

Lan Lan is discussing happiness with us. She cuts time, our faces, our dreams, our crystal gaze.
So how does this happen: when we leave her, washed, new, mellow, happy that she conducted us,
drowned us, left us hovering in this … what? nothing?
Blessed be the day I discovered her writing.
—Tomaž Šalamun

Considered one of today’s most influential Chinese lyrical writers, Lan Lan emerged
as a representative woman poet during the early nineties. A consistent presence
in the mainland literary scene, her writing renews the need to address lyricism
when the dominant cultural discourse favors phallocentrism and the privilege of
human over non-human. Presented in five thematic sections, this bilingual collection
compiles Lan Lan’s most characteristic work as it showcases her lyricism, austerity,
luminosity, and moral sensibilities. Many of these poems have been anthologized in China
and abroad. However, other than two translations in Push Open the Window
(Copper Canyon Press, 2010) and a sampling in Another Kind of Nation: An Anthology
of Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Talisman House, 2007), none of her poetry exists
in English in a coherent entirety.
—from the Preface by Fiona Sze-Lorrain)

Born in 1967 in Yantai, Shandong province, Lan Lan is considered one of today’s
most influential Chinese lyrical poets. She is the bestselling author of several poetry titles
including Life with a Smile (1990), Inner Life (1997),
Dream, Dream (2003) and From Here, to Here (2010).
Also a prolific prose and children’s fiction writer, her work has been translated into
ten languages. Awarded the Liu Li’an Poetry Prize in 1996, she was voted the top writer
of the “Best Ten Women Poets” in China. In 2009, she received four of China’s highest
literary honors: the “Poetry & People” Award, the Yulong Poetry Prize,
the “Best Ten Poets in China” Award, and the Bing Xin Children’s Literature New Work Award.
A regular guest at international poetry festivals, she lives in Beijing.
Canyon in the Body is her first poetry collection in English.

Author of two books of poetry, My Funeral Gondola (Mānoa Books/El León, 2013)
and Water the Moon (Marick, 2010), as well as several volumes of translation
of contemporary Chinese, American and French poets, Fiona Sze-Lorrain
co-edited the Mānoa anthologies, Sky Lanterns (2012) and On Freedom:
Spirit, Art, and State (2013), both from the University of Hawai’i Press.
She lives in France where she is an editor at Vif Éditions and Cerise Press.

I am so grateful readers have been given this new opportunity to hear the
story of Freedom Summer told directly by some of the young people who
helped make that extraordinary moment happen.Letters from Mississippi
gives us a deeply personal look at one of the Civil Rights Movement's
key moments—and reminds us that change happens because regular people
have decided they were willing to fight for it.
—Marian Wright Edelman, president, Children's Defense Fund

These letters in perceptiveness, freshness of detail and description, variety
of events and situations, and range of experience are unlike anything
I've since encountered in civil rights literature. Collectively, they
constitute an irreplaceable record of an extraordinary movement in American
social and cultural history at midcentury.
—Ekwueme Michael Thelwell

These letters bring to life, sometimes with tears, always with pride,
that extraordinary summer when young people from all over the country
joined black people in Mississippi in their determined quest for equal rights.
Elizabeth Martínez, with this volume, makes an invaluable and unique contribution
to the history of social struggle in America.
—Howard Zinn

During the summer of 1964, a presidential election year, SNCC (Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee) sent volunteers into Mississippi to expand Black voter
registration in the state, to organize a legally constituted "Freedom Democratic
Party" that would challenge the whites-only Mississippi Democratic party,
to establish "freedom schools" which taught reading and math to Black children,
and to open community centers where individuals could obtain legal and medical
assistance.

This 50th anniversary edition of Letters from Mississippi retains
the introduction by Julian Bond, and updates the explanatory background notes
and biographies of volunteers from that summer. The 50th anniversary edition
also includes over 40 pages of poetry that was written by students in the
Freedom Schools, with a prefatory note by Langston Hughes.

Elizabeth Martínez is a Chicana writer, activist and teacher.
She speaks on racism, multiculturalism, women's struggles and today's new
movements. In the 1960s and 70s, she worked in the Black civil rights movement
and the Chicano movement. She co-founded and currently chairs the Institute
for MultiRacial Justice to help build alliances between communities of color.
Martínez is the author of six books and numerous articles.

Sen-Senkov’s poetry has no hero in the obvious sense; although uttered in a voice
that clearly has timbre and personal shading, we don’t know whose it is or where
it is coming from. When you read deeply into this poetry, however, you realize
that there is indeed a person behind this voice: one who perceives any and all
cultural symbols as fractures in the universe, as ciphers and “sore spots” at the same
time, which demand a vital reciprocal effort in order to overcome various historical
traumas. Nothing gets the benefit of the doubt, but as soon as you begin to live out
these symbols and myths, to fill them out through personal involvement,
then everything begins to come together: the death of Heath Ledger,
the story of how the constellations acquired meaning, reminiscences of childhood.
One thing begins to resound with another, and it turns out that our hero is a person
who doesn’t want to live in a fragmented reality. It’s fragmented, of course,
but he strives again and again to see it as whole. This effort cannot be called heroic.
That would be a profanation and a vulgarization; but this is an effort to make sense
of the world, one that takes us beyond the heroic and non-heroic.
—Ilya Kukulin

The omnivorous quality of Sen-Senkov’s roving eye is especially interesting
in its relationship to history. Here is a poet constantly delving into human history;
his engagement ranges as far back as prehistoric times, but circles back
again and again to a few points of particular interest—in this collection,
most notably the harrowed lives of early Christian martyrs and the endless upheaval
of twentieth-century Europe. It is perhaps in this cyclical interrogation of the past,
and ruminations on the consequences of inevitably repeated mistakes,
that Sen-Senkov is most thoroughly a poet in the Russian tradition.
Though his orientation is often markedly international, he could never reflect the
legendary American forgetfulness of history: he gives us a Kraftwerk concert
through the lens of the Soviet occupation of Nazi Germany, and a pack of Gitanes
is enough to evoke a century of persecution by various peoples and governmental
structures. At the same time, Sen-Senkov is not a political poet; he is a poet
of description, and politics and history come to his attention as do Barbie dolls
and soccer balls.
—from the Translator Introduction

Andrei Sen-Senkov is the author of more than ten books of poetry and prose, as well as
solo and collaborative publications/performances involving visual poetry and experimental
music. He has also published translations of poetry and a children’s book of original
fairy tales, A Cat Named Mouse. He is a regular participant in literary festivals
in Russia and abroad. In 1998 he was an award-winner at the Turgenev Festival
for Short Prose, and in 2006, 2008 and 2012 he was shortlisted for the Andrei Bely Prize.
In the U.S., his work has been published in journals such as Aufgabe,
Interim, Jacket, and Zoland Poetry, and anthologized in
Crossing Centuries (Talisman).

Ainsley Morse has been translating 20th- and 21st-century Russian and
(former-) Yugoslav literature since 2006. A longtime student of both literatures,
she is currently writing a dissertation on unofficial Soviet-era literature at
Harvard University. In addition to Anatomical Theater, she is the co-translator
(with Bela Shayevich) of I Live I See: the Collected Poems of Vsevolod Nekrasov
(UDP, 2013). Current translation projects include an anthology of Lianozovo poets and
a collection of contemporary Russian experimental prose, as well as ongoing work
with twentieth-century Yugoslav authors.

Peter Golub is a writer and translator living in San Francisco.
He has published in Circumference, PEN America, and Playboy.
He is a translator of contemporary Russian poetry and has worked on several anthologies,
including the large online project The New Russian Poetry (Jacket 2).
He has one book of poems, My Imagined Funeral (Argo Risk Press, 2007).
He is the recipient of a PEN Translation Grant, and is an editor with St. Petersburg Review.
The translation of this book was supported by a BILTC Translation Fellowship.

Relocations is a highly enjoyable collection of poetry introducing
the English-language world to three incredibly diverse and talented women poets
writing in Russian that could be as meaningful to a casual fan of poetry
as to a comparative literature scholar.
[full review]
—Will Evans, Three Percent

In distinct ways all three poets featured in Relocations are engaged
in the project of renovating Russia’s great modernist tradition for a radically
different historical situation. They write poems of imaginative daring,
pushing recognizable scenarios into the fantastic, the surreal or the speculative,
bending form and language to the task.

Polina Barskova began publishing her poetry at age nine and
is the author of eight books
of poems; her latest, Ariel’s Dispatch (Soobshchenie Ariela, NLO, 2011),
was nominated for an Andrey Bely award. Two collections of her poetry in English
translation appeared recently: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press, 2010) and
The Zoo in Winter (Melville House Press, 2010). She is a published scholar
with degrees in classical literature (from St. Petersburg University) and
Slavic languages and literatures (UC Berkeley). Her research has focused on
cultural life during the siege of Leningrad, about which she has numerous publications
and two forthcoming books. She currently teaches Russian literature at Hampshire College
and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Anna Glazova is a poet, translator and scholar of German and
Comparative Literature with a PhD from Northwestern University.
She is the author of three books of poems, the most recent, For a Shrew
(Dlia zemleroiki, NLO, 2013), being honored with the Russian Prize for Poetry.
She has translated into Russian books by Robert Walser, Unica Zürn and Ladislav Klima;
her translations of Paul Celan’s poetry recently appeared under the title
Speak you, too (Govori i ty, Ailuros, 2012). A volume of her poems
in translations by Anna Khasin, Twice under the Sun, appeared with Shearsman Books
in 2008. Her scholarship has focused on the work of Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam.
She teaches and resides in Hamburg, Germany and the United States.

Maria Stepanova is the author of nine books of poems and the recipient
of numerous literary awards, including the Andrei Bely award (2005) and a Joseph Brodsky
Memorial Fellowship (2010). Among her most notable works are a book of post-modern ballads,
Songs of the Northern Southerners (Pesni severnykh iuzhan, ARGO-RISK, 2001)
and a book-length narrative poem, John Doe’s Prose (Proza Ivana Sidorova,
NLO, 2008). Relocations presents the first extensive selection of her poems
in English translation. Her activities as an essayist and journalist make her a visible
cultural figure. Since 2007 she has worked as editor of the independent online journal
OpenSpace.ru, now reconfigured as the crowd-sourced
journal Colta.ru. She is a lifelong resident of Moscow.

* * *

Catherine Ciepiela is a scholar and translator of modern Russian poetry.
She is the author of a book on Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak
(The Same Solitude, Cornell UP, 2006) and co-editor with Honor Moore of
The Stray Dog Cabaret (NYRB 2006), a book of Paul Schmidt’s translations
of the Russian modernists. Her translations have appeared in The New Yorker,
The Nation, The Massachusetts Review, Seneca Review,
Pequod and The Common. She teaches Russian literature and poetic
translation at Amherst College.

Anna Khasin is an independent translator and poet living in Boston.
Her earlier translations of Anna Glazova were published by Shearsman Books under the title
Twice Under the Sun (2008).

Sibelan Forrester is Professor of Russian at Swarthmore College
with a scholarly focus on Russian modernist poetry, particularly the work of Marina
Tsvetaeva. She writes her own poetry and has published poetic and scholarly translations
from Croatian (Dubravka Oraić-Tolić’s American Scream and
Palindrome Apocalypse, Ooligan Press, 2004), Russian (Elena Ignatova’s
Diving Bell, Zephyr Press, 2006;
Vladimir Propp’s Russian Folktale, Wayne State University Press, 2012),
and Serbian (stories by Milica Mićić-Dimovska and an excerpt from Miroljub Todovorić’s
verbal-visual novel Apeiron).

“One of the most important books of our time: these are at once unsettling
and comforting, timely and wryly moving poems about the laughable annoyances,
limited joys, and the never fully present sorrows of cosmopolitanism, the life
of the citizens of the world.”
—Gabriel Gudding

“Wróblewski is the true poetic chronicler of our 21st century diaspora in all
its absurdities and anxieties … Kopenhaga is a journey to the end of the night
that always makes a U-turn in the middle, to take in the latest folly—and also
self-rescue mission—of the transplant. Read it and weep—and then laugh!”
—Marjorie Perloff

Kopenhaga is the first comprehensive collection of prose poetry by Grzegorz Wróblewski,
one of Poland’s leading contemporary writers. The book offers a series of vignettes
from the crossroads of politics and culture, technology and ethics, consumerism and
spirituality. It combines two tropes: the emigrant’s double identity and
the ethnographer’s search for patterns. While ostensibly focused on Denmark,
it functions as an investigation of alterity in the post-cold war era of
ethnic strife and global capitalism. Whether he writes about refugees in Copenhagen
(one of Europe’s major transnational cities), or the homeless, or the mentally ill,
or any other marginalized group, Wróblewski points to the moral contradictions
of a world supposedly without borders.

Grzegorz Wróblewski, born in 1962 in Gdańsk and raised in Warsaw,
has been living in Copenhagen since 1985. He has published ten volumes of poetry
and three collections of short prose pieces in Poland; three books of poetry,
a book of poetic prose and an experimental novel in Denmark; a book of selected poems
in Bosnia-Herzegovina; and a selection of plays. His work has been translated
into fifteen languages. His poems in English translation appear in many journals,
anthologies, and chapbooks, as well as in two collections Our Flying Objects
(Equipage Press, 2007) and A Marzipan Factory (Otoliths, 2010).

Piotr Gwiazda has published two books of poetry, Messages
(Pond Road Press, 2012) and Gagarin Street (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2005).
He is also the author of James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and
Poetic Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He is an Associate Professor of English
at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).

Tomasz Różycki’s Colonies is one of the most remarkable sonnet sequences
of our time: the work of a wandering, restless, and moral mind, here rendered
with clarity and vividness by the translations of Mira Rosenthal.
— Susan Stewart

In Tomasz Różycki’s lyric profusion, I hear the sharp blasts of a mordant intellect,
but not without the human notes of an infinite melancholy playing in the background.
This is the soundtrack of a valiant mind, a layered imagination that nonchalantly
apprehends and formally measures the tarnished world in demotic language such that
it enchantingly restores simplicity and bewilderment to our existence.
—Major Jackson

Tomasz Różycki walks to work every day through the city of Opole, in the Polish region
of Silesia, where he has lived since his birth in 1970. The fact that he is walking
is important: the rhythm of feet on concrete and cobblestone, the familiar view across
the Odra River, the regular length of time it takes him to reach his destination.
Poetry has a long friendship with walking, good for pacing the flow of thought and
establishing a strong rhythm. We are familiar with the idea in the Anglophone tradition
from the late eighteenth century, when the Romantic poets transformed walking
into a cultural and aesthetic act of taking pleasure in a landscape. For William
Wordsworth, almost daily excursions on foot as well as longer walking tours functioned
as a way to compose and revise poems that sprung from his meditations on the countryside.
But what is important in Różycki’s daily walking is not so much any pastoral awareness
it brings about but the fact that such rambling often leads to more sustained interest
in the history of a place. Wordsworth’s pedestrian experience of the Lake District moved
him to write a guidebook that traced the history of the region; so, too, Różycki’s paced
knowledge of his part of Silesia roots him in a historical curiosity. In Colonies,
his sixth collection, this curiosity blooms into an outright aesthetic obsession.
—from the Translator’s Introduction

Tomasz Różycki is a poet, critic, and translator. Over the last ten years,
he has garnered almost every prize Poland has to offer, as well as widespread critical
and popular acclaim in translation in numerous languages. Różycki is the author
of seven volumes of poetry, most recently Kolonie (Colonies) and Księga obrotów
(The Book of Rotations). Over the course of his career, he has developed an
extraordinarily distinctive, personal poetic voice that combines highly concrete imagery
with evocative references to the historical legacy of his family and his time.
He has lived his whole life in Opole, a previously German city that was repopulated
by Poles relocated from the Ukrainian area of eastern Poland taken over by the Soviets
after World War II. He is considered to be an inheritor of the tradition of
Czesław Miłosz and Adam Zagajewski, and his highly formal work deals with questions
of both literary and ancestral tradition. His awards include the Krzysztof Kamiel
Baczyński Prize (1997), the Czas Kultury Prize (1997), The Rainer Maria Rilke Award
(1998), the Kościelski Foundation Prize (2004), and the Joseph Brodski Prize from
Zeszyty Literackie (2006). He has been nominated twice for the Nike Prize
(Poland’s top literary honor) and once for the Paszport Polityki (2004).
He lives in his hometown of Opole with his wife and two children and teaches
at Opole University. Zephyr Press has also published his
The Forgotten Keys.

While on a Fulbright Fellowship to Poland, Mira Rosenthal
discovered her passion for translating contemporary Polish poetry. Her translations and
scholarship on Polish literature have received numerous awards, including fellowships
from the PEN Translation Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the
American Council of Learned Societies. Her own poetry has been published widely,
and her collection The Local World, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize, came out
from Kent State in 2011. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Houston and
a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Indiana University. She is a Wallace Stegner
Fellow at Stanford University.